Guide for startup link builders: What you need to know?

By Sef
Posted On
Thursday, May 08, 2014
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One must know the basics and rules before he puts himself into something new particularly in digital marketing industry. Before you start on doing something, you will need to prepare yourself by learning new information, process and extra patience of course. Whether you’re thinking of getting into Paid advertisements, Social Media and even Content Marketing, you need to know how the process works in order for you to cope up with the demand of your chosen field.

Particularly, this is most likely applicable for SEO link builders, who are in charge of increasing the quality of inbound links to a page in order for a website to rank higher in organic search in a natural way. Since links are probably one of the most important ranking factors that search engines use, link builders must know the rules of obtaining links in a non-manipulative way which means, links that can stand the test of time.

In this post, I’ll provide the information for startup link builders before they start creating links for the website of their clients before they mess up and put those websites at high potential risks of getting penalized due to manipulative approach or unnatural linking approach.

Let’s get started.

First off, let’s get the definition of link building from Wikipedia, everyone’s source of information.

Right, creating links is easy though, but are those the links that your website needs to increase their authority and visibility of your website in your industry that can stand the test of time? Or those are the links that will deteriorate your website’s credibility in search engines that can result to penalization? You have to know the answer, otherwise you will probably lose your clients if they get hit or penalized by Google’s algorithm when they roll out or launch a new one.

Importance of links for rankings

Google uses links for search rankings, that’s for sure
and that’s why they often send manual penalty emails to websites
through Google Webmaster Tools that
they believe manipulating their search visibility – With this in mind, you
can validate that search engines use links as an important signal to determine
a website’s value, importance and worthwhile your website is to audience
and industry.

Manual Action by Month

However, although links play an important role for websites, link builders should not get all the links that they want even the websites they are thinking of getting a link from are high quality and authoritative due to following reasons:

Relevancy – Search engines reward sites that get links from the websites that are related to them naturally – so if the link source of your website are mainly from artificial link building approach such as submission, blog comments, forum signatures and bookmarks in a large scale, your link profile might become questionable.

Location – Search engines use the location of the links that are referring to your website as a signal to identify where you’re attempting to rank – so if the domain extension of your website ends with .ca, you only have to create links from websites with the same domain extension of .ca and if you happen to create links from .au site in a large, you will probably not rank in your target location.

Engagement – Visitors engagement on a website is also important and a top priority when deciding to create links on your prospect websites – Your website needs to benefit from links you’ll generate in terms of traffic and not only juice.

Links play an important role for websites; they serve a vote for a website to escalate its authority and ability to rank in organic search. Links are also indication of trust to a website, which means the more inbound links your website has, the more trust factor they can send to your domain.

Link Acquisition Methods

Link building is an art. It’s one of the basics
but the most challenging part as a link builder as you are opt to practice the
approach that is not against in search rankings. It also requires creativity,
patience and dedication when you’re creating links for your website – this means,
you will have to create links that can be really useful to your website and not
the type of links that you create just for the sake of links.

There are several types of link building methods that can link builders can put into practice and incorporate to benefit their websites, but the getting to know the basics is sometimes much better than doing the advanced approach in which you are not yet sure will work effectively for your websites.

Editorially given links

These are the links that your website earned naturally, given by other websites that are related to your industry. Editorial links are much more valuable and trustworthy in link development as it shows that a website has produced something important and unique to its audience which deserves to be shared widely within their industry via link back or social share.

How to get editorial links?

Produce a share worthy content

Do case study content

Controversial content

Newsworthy content

Manual outreach link building

This type of method requires strategy and
creativity as you’ll have to communicate with the people in your industry
particularly website owners or bloggers that can potentially allow you to link
to their website in a non-manipulative way of course.

How to do manual/outreach link
building approach?

Create an alert of your brand mentions

Offer your content to industry bloggers

Broken link building

Self-created links building

Self created links are the ones you personally created
with intent to link your personal blog, website or article in your contribution
in various channels that are topically related to your website, niche or industry.
This type of approach is normally overly abused by link builders that aim to
build inbound links to their website and hope to increase their search
rankings. Unfortunately, it does not work out that way since Google released
their Google Penguin algorithm.

Since Google has been dedicated in identifying and
penalizing websites that they believe practicing SEO against their Guidelines,
performing the following methods below will help you create links to your
profile that does not violate their search guidelines:

Q&A approach

Forum contribution

Content distribution

Business and Individual profile creation

Significant things to know in link creation

There are some imperative approach that you need to keep in
mind when link building for a website. This approach can help you make your
link profile non-manipulative, although not essentially pure natural link
building, you can assure to your clients that it’s not overly against
to Google guidelines and the end result will not be prone to website penalty.

Followed links – Followed links are the ones that can pass “juice/authority’ to a webpage which helps a page to rank higher in SERP. However, if
you focus on creating followed links to your website, this may cause negative
results to your website – Remember the terms
diversify is one crucial word in digital marketing.

Hottest Google Algorithms

Google’s dedication to fight spammers have never been doubted, they
keep on releasing and updating their algorithms to identify which websites are
manipulating their search rankings, practicing link building methods or tactics
that are against their rules and guidelines.

Google Panda – Is a change to Google's search results ranking
algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower
the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites"

Google Penguin – Aims to decreasing search engine rankings of
websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO
techniques involved in increasing artificially the ranking of a webpage by
manipulating the number of links pointing to the page. Such tactics are
commonly described as link schemes.

Google Hummingbird – About synonyms but
also about context of search queries which aims to deliver search results as
quick as possible Google could come up with

SEO tools:

Ahrefs– The largest and the freshest index of live links. Index is
updated every 15 min. Ahrefs Site Explorer is free to try.

Open Site Explorer – Open Site Explorer
is Moz's Search Engine for Links. Perform competitive link research, explore
backlinks, anchor text, and more for free

SEO sites:

SEO by the Sea– SEO by the
Sea explores search engine patents and white papers, and provides internet
marketing and search engine optimization

Search Engine Land– Search Engine Land is a must read hub for
news and information about search engine marketing, optimization and how search
engines such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live.com and Ask.com work for
searchers.

Search Engine Roundtable– A well-rounded view on search engines and
search engine marketing from five segments of the Web population represented by
senior members of the major SEO/SEM forums on the Internet.SEO Blogs